AU mod: Balancing Ground Unit Bombardment

[donZappo]

Originally posted by Dominae
What ever happened to Artillery? Just because the game "ends" with Cavalry does not mean Artillery is not the most unbalanced bombardment unit versus the AI.
Dominae

I'll agree with that! Especially since the game won't (hopefully!) end at cavalry anymore this could become a large issue.

-donZappo

[alexman]

Due to a lack of proposals and inexperience with the effectiveness of new bombardment rules in the Industrial era of C3C, we decided to leave Artillery unchanged for the first AU game, so we can find out just how bad the problem really is. See the first few posts in the thread.

The most effective way to fix Artillery is to reduce its range, but even a reduction in strength from 12 to 8 is possible without making it worse than stock Cannon in cost effectiveness.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by Dominae

Just because the game "ends" with Cavalry does not mean Artillery is not the most unbalanced bombardment unit versus the AI.

Artillery is only "the most unbalanced bombardment unit versus the AI" in the eyes of those who haven't experienced the joys and wonders of the new and improved Radar Artillery in C3C. Seriously, I do think toning down artillery and radar artillery would tone down the rather overwhelming power of the "bombard the AI's units down to one hit point and practically walk in" strategy.

I like the idea of reducing the units' firepower a lot better than I like the idea of reducing their range. Reducing artillery's range would make fights using huge stacks of artillery more painful because each attack would take an extra turn to set up, but the actual strategic balance would hardly be affected at all unless a player is in a hurry. The artillery would take an extra turn to get in range, but once they do, the same number of artillery would do the same job reducing the enemy units in a city to virtual irrelevance. In essence, we would be encouraging players to use bad strategy because they don't want to take the time to use good strategy.

A reduction in firepower would force players to build and maintain more artillery units to do the same job, significantly increasing the cost of artillery-based tactics compared with other tactics. That would give players a sound strategic reason to consider which approach will suit their needs best.

[alexman]

OK, it's Friday in much of the World, so let's vote.

My order of preference:
B) Catapult=30s, Trebuchet=35s
D) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=70s/2ROF
C) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=35s
A) No change

[lockstep]

(best)

B) Catapult=30s, Trebuchet=35s
D) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=70s/2ROF
C) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=35s
A) No change

(worst)

[Theseus]

ABCD

For B and possibly A, what about Cats at 25s?

[Stuie]

B) Catapult=30s, Trebuchet=35s
C) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=35s
A) No change
D) Trebuchet=25s, Cannon/Hwach'a=70s/2ROF

[Nor Me]

ABCD

[Zero]

What about hwachas. If you think cannon is unbalanced.... dont they have lethal bombardment now?

You can take over cities with zero losss with you stack defenders and hwachas!!!11!!!!

[sabrewolf]

zero, you won't get any promotions, if you bomb them to death
i actually prefer redlining units first and then hoping for elites or a GL when clearing up... you may lose sometimes and your units need to heal, but it's often worth it...

with bombers this was a different aspect because of the 10 tile range.

[pvzh]

AU mod introduced more expensive artillery pieces: catapults are 30 (were 20), trebuchers 35 (were 30); whereas, AI is known to be not using them offensively. Spending 30 shields on catapult that sits in a city waited to be attacked to possibly take out 1 HP IS wasteful. It is just a prize for human player when he captures the city.

I suggest to set build priorities for all AI's (including Koreans) to 'Never' in regards to artillery.

[alexman]

I just tested something: I gave the AI a bunch of Catapults and started the game in debug mode. Not only did the AI keep all 13 Catapults in the city where I placed them, but they did not even fire at my chariot that stopped adjacent to that city. Another thing that's broken in C3C that used to work better in PTW.

Build-never sounds good to me.

[alexman]

By the way, how does Artillery seem, now that we have a little more experience with the new ground unit bombardment? Too powerful, or in line with air power?

[Jaybe]

... Not only did the AI keep all 13 Catapults in the city where I placed them ...

What might happen if you placed those catapults OUTSIDE a city??

--
To counterbalance human artillery, I am thinking of giving defensive bombardment to Infantry and Mech Inf., representing organic mortars and artillery. Standard 1/2 of attack strength.
At least when defending a city, those stacks of defending (even red-lined) units should help whittle down the attackers.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by alexman
By the way, how does Artillery seem, now that we have a little more experience with the new ground unit bombardment? Too powerful, or in line with air power?

In a recent game, I made very extensive use of both artillery and bombers. I had a big enough tech lead that I didn't have to worry about having my bombers shot down, so both types of units were able to attack with impunity.

Against targets out in the open, bombers worked wonderfully. Comparing the stats, bombers have the same bombardment attack value as artillery but their rate of fire is one higher. (And since I wasn't playing with the AU Mod, bombers could kill.)

Bombers could also kill AI ships in places that artillery couldn't even reach. That is definitely a nice advantage.

Against cities, bombers have both advantages and disadvantages. Bombers have a longer reach than artillery do, so where artillery usually have to spend every other turn repositioning to get in range to fire (and sometimes two turns repositioning), bombers have to waste a turn only when the front has advanced enough to take them out of range. On the other hand, the new "target units first" algorithm does not apply to bombers. Bombers often destroy buildings and kill civilians instead of damaging enemy units. (At least that was true with the 1.12 patch, and I've seen no indication that it's been changed since.) If a player wants to knock a metropolis down to a city to reduce the effective value of its defendes, bombers are useful, but since I more typically want to take cities intact, I find it highly annoying. Further, unless bombers reduce a city's size enough to undercut its defense bonus, the attacks that don't hit units are wasted. Mostly, I used bombers against cities only when it let me attack them sooner than I could have using artillery (either because it would have taken two turns to move artillery into position or because all my artillery were busy elsewhere).

Bombers operating out of captured enemy cities face an additional risk in that a culture flip could cost a player an entire huge stack of them. That didn't actually happen to me in my game, but it was something I had to worry about a bit (and I tended to keep more units in cities with bombers than I would have otherwise to help reduce the risk of flipping). I don't know whether that risk could be countered by spending workers to build airbases or whether an airbase that suddenly found itself within enemy cultural borders after a flip would be destroyed and all its bombers with it. If bombers at airbases that find themselves within enemy borders after a culture flip would be destroyed, the only really safe option for a player in a weak cultural position (short of having truly massive numbers of units sit around as MPs) would be to bring settlers along and build cities in between captured AI cities to serve as airbases. That would be a bit messy and would add to the cost of bomber operations. (Also note that under Communism that late in the game, the loose city build pattern AIs favor can actually be a very good thing since fewer, larger cities mean less corruption.)

Another drawback to bombers, one that I didn't face in that particular game but which players often would face overall, is that bombers can be shot down. In contrast, properly protected artillery face no real danger of being killed when they are used. Thus, once enemies have a significant ability to shoot down bombers (which they may or may not have when the human player first gets bombers, depending on the status of the tech race), the balance of advantage shifts a bit more in favor of artillery.

All in all, I think the balance between bombers and artillery is good enough that no change is really needed purely from that perspective. On the other hand, artillery provide a powerful bombardment capability quite a few techs before bombers (and with enemies more likely to be still using riflemen), which has nasty implications for the AIs. Artillery/cavalry stacks with appropriate defensive support can eat up territory against riflemen with very few losses, as can artillery/tank stacks against infantry (and artillery can be built before tanks so artillery production need not compete with tank production the way bomber production almost inevitably does).

Reducing the bombardment strength of artillery from 12 to 10 would undercut the power of such tactics a bit (and thus help the AIs), and I don't think it would make the choice of how much to use artillery and how much to use bombers less interesting than it is currently in the AU Mod. Compared with cannons, artillery would still have a slightly higher bombardment strength, and their longer range and higher rate of fire would easily justify their cost. (For offensive use, artillery often have to spend only half the time repositioning that cannons need, and being able to attack every two or three turns instead of every three or four is a huge advantage all by itself.) So I see no risk of balance problems between artillery and cannons either.

Conclusion: I would support reducing the bombardment strength of artillery from 12 to 10. Yes, it would undercut a strategy I really enjoy using, but isn't that the idea?

I also very strongly endorse the idea of having AIs never build bombardment land units. It seems to me that any losses that such units cause me are easily repaid and then some when I capture them and turn them against the AIs. Consider the fact that even if a trebuchet tips the balance between a MedInf's losing or winning, capturing the trebuchet repays all but five shields of the MedInf's value with our revised costs. And a lot of the time, the trebuchet's shot won't tip the balance, either because the trebuchet misses or because the extra hit point of damage to the attacking MedInf won't change the outcome of the battle.